On changing views about physical law, evolution and progress in the second half of the nineteenth century

Resumen

There has been deep disagreements about the significance of Darwin’s theory of evolution on changes on the notion of progress that prevailed during the nineteenth century in Britain and many other countries. As part of a widespread view it is generally argued that Darwin was fully aware of the important implications of his views for overthrowing the traditional Victorian notion of progress and thus that in an important sense Darwin was more a thinker of our times than of the nineteenth century. Important replies to this traditional view have argued that Darwin’s views are tinted with the teleological view of progress and evolution common in his times. In this paper I want to argue that both views are to some extent right. It will be shown that even though there is a close affinity between Spencer and Darwin concerning their common adherence to a teleological and moral notion of progress, there are important differences as well. These are related to the role that Darwin thought contingency plays in evolutionary explanations. This view of Darwin is importantly different from the view of most contemporaries and lead to a different characterization of evolution. For Darwin, but not for most of his contemporaries, progress is not to be seen as the necessary result of the existence of a physical law that would supposedly ground the explanatory power of evolution. As Chauncey Wright points out in the early 1870’s, one should not look at Darwin’s theory of evolution in analogy with mechanics, but rather with meteorology. From this perspective, natural selection is not really “a cause” described by a law, rather it is the mode of operation of a certain limited class of causes. Wright’s comparison is the first suggestion that the theory of evolution is a different sort of theory because of the role that contingencies play in framing the ontology for explanations. As Boutroux will clearly formulate the basic idea in 1874, the recognition of the central role of contingencies in explanations leads to a view of reality as consisting of different domains, each one explicable by different sets of laws. Wright and Boutrox are used in this paper to argue that, even though Darwin never formulates the idea explicitly, his view requires taking stand against a problematic notion of physical law that was widely assumed to be a point of departure for the discussion about the nature of progress.